4 Responses

Over the years, the consumer costs of books (hardcover and paperback) have risen dramatically. Yet the product is the same as it was 30 or more years ago: words on a printed page. If anything, the cost of producing the book should have come down for the publishers, particularly on the pre-production side. With the advent of computers, spell check, etc., the work of editors is greatly reduced and sped up. Layout is not an issue on an e-book, it’s done within the software depending on the type size the reader prefers. The only costs that might have gone up would be shipping and other fees associated with the raw products (paper, etc…) and shipping for the final product. These costs disappear with the e-book.

No, I won’t pay $10 for an e-book. Maybe – just maybe – I’ll pay $5 for a really good one. More like $3. If it’s got DRM on it, my price point is even lower, because I can’t sell it back at the used book store or pass it on to someone like I do with a hard copy now.

The only people that need get any real slice of the pie here are the authors, who do by far the majority of the work. The publishing companies should now get 25% of the sale price of the book, with the author getting 75%. After years of raking the authors over the coals, the publishing industry is now getting a chance to lie in the bed that they made.

As for the IPod Touch, Christmas rush version — after much debate amongst the authors/readers my wife knows, the iPod Touch was the favorite. That’s what appeared under our tree this year. Problem: The wife doesn’t have a clue what can easily be converted to be placed on one of those things. Case in point — Apollo 13 movie legally purchased from Amazon’s UnBox — too difficult. The DVD of it is floating around here somewhere, but this was a concept gone too far. I’ll have her stick with easier conversion requests – like grabbing the 40+ songs she’s purchased from ITunes and resides on the now dead Win2K computer sitting in the other room. Grabbing the songs from the hard drive is easy, “unauthorizing the computer from her ITunes account” to save an authorization will be another thing all together…

The drive for profits is going to come back and bite the publisher’s butt.

As with the music industry, writer’s don’t need a publishing to get on the map any more.

Rising musicians can record near state of the art tracks and then publish for free directly to web sites, youtube, market through blog connections or artful Twitter campaigns. Once awareness hits a certain point and new material is demanded, then new recordings can be sold directly to the consumers, pretty much eliminating the need for the MediaCorp halfway house that seems bent on controlling it’s Golden Geese.

Musicians have always had have been more tech savvy than writers and they glommed onto the possibilities of the internet.

Authors, well, they have been a little slower to catch on, but they will, oh, they will!

If my favorite SF author gets $2 from his publisher for every $10 book sold (just a guess, mind you) I have no problem paying the author $3 directly and downloading the book from his site.

To tell the truth, I don’t even mind the thought of paying the library a $1 or two download and read a book, as long as I know the author gets the lion’s share of the money. (My only proviso would be that the “great” publishing houses profit little from it.)

Why? Because that encourages the author to write more… and better (hopefully). And if they can live better and I can have my “good read” well, ah, that would be the best of my possible worlds! (With apologies to Voltaire. lol!)